500 French Verbs For Dummies
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com
Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Verb Tables/Verb Indexing provided by HarperCollins:
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013
All original Material provided by author: WILEY
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936424
ISBN 978-1-118-51602-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-61273-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-61274-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-61284-2 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
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About the Author
Dr. Zoe Erotopoulos holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University in New York City. She has also studied in Aix-en-Provence, at the Sorbonne, and at the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris. Her teaching experience ranges from elementary to advanced-level courses in French, including literature and theater. Dr. Erotopouloss area of expertise is 17th-century French theater. Throughout her academic career, she has taught at a number of institutions, including Columbia University, Reid Hall in Paris, and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is presently teaching in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Dr. Erotopoulos is the author of the latest edition of French For Dummies.
Dedication
To my children with all my love.
Authors Acknowledgments
A big thank-you to the acquisitions editor Erin Calligan Mooney who gave me the opportunity to work on 500 French Verbs For Dummies. I was also very fortunate to work once again with Chad Sievers, my project editor, whose suggestions, sense of humor, and knowledge of the For Dummies style were an invaluable part of the writing of this book. To the technical reviewers, Scott Powers, PhD, and Michael Foster, PhD, thank you for your expertise and for your scrupulous attention to detail.
Publishers Acknowledgments
Acquisitions Editor: Erin Calligan Mooney
Project Editor: Chad R. Sievers
Copy Editor: Chad R. Sievers
Technical Editors: Michael Foster, PhD, and Scott Powers, PhD
Art Coordinator: Alicia B. South
Project Coordinator: Patrick Redmond
Project Manager: Laura Moss-Hollister
Producer: Marilyn Hummel
Cover Photo: iStockphoto.com/3DStock
V erbs are the building blocks of any sentence structure. You use them every day to say what youre doing, where you are or going to be, what youve done, what you aspire to do or be, and so on. Whether youre asking questions, recounting your past, talking about your likes and dislikes, expressing your wishes and aspirations, or giving orders, you use verbs. In your native language, the use of verbs is intuitive. You know exactly how to conjugate the verb, whether its regular or irregular, and which tense to use for various circumstances. However, when youre studying a foreign language, you need to be aware of these types of details so that you can correctly conjugate the verbs and accurately use them.
Added to this challenge is the fact that French has many more tenses than English. It actually has more than twice as many tenses, with 14 in total. Dont worry though, because you dont use all the French tenses in everyday conversations. French has many literary tenses that you dont use much in spoken French. No matter how much French you know or have studied, youve come to the right place. 500 French Verbs For Dummies can help.
500 French Verbs For Dummies is a handy reference book that includes the conjugation of 500 verbs in 14 tenses, as well as their imperative and present participle forms. Each verb is conjugated to correspond to appropriate subject pronouns, with their distinct endings, which for the majority of verbs are regular and easily distinguishable. In fact, you may notice many similar patterns upon perusing the verb conjugations. Furthermore, each tense has specific endings that you add to the stem.
After a while, youll become an expert in recognizing and forming the various tenses. So, refer to the verb tables as often as you want to look up the meaning of a verb or the tenses that you need. The verbs appear alphabetically and in a clear and precise order for easy access, with each verb appearing on one page. Before the verb conjugations, this book also includes a few chapters to get you started.
While writing this book, I made at least one of the following assumptions about you: